In this Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, photo released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows foreign nationals being arrested this week during a targeted enforcement operation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens in Los Angeles.

One thing that hasn’t changed in 2018: Immigration remains a fraught issue across the country, but especially in California.

Here, the question of how much to enforce standing law, and how selectively, is often more than a matter of political conflict, striking at the heart of our shared morality for millions on both sides.

So it’s no surprise that, as the Trump administration has provoked California officials who consider themselves members of the “resistance” against White House policy, those officials have risen to the bait.

Decades of uneven enforcement and rhetoric, leading to the sharply contrasting approaches of the Obama administration, has ensured that plenty of gray area in immigration law has remained.

But rather than staking out defensible positions behind the state-level protections they secured for undocumented immigrants in the past, too many California officials take a more aggressive strategy guaranteed to trigger legal warfare with the Trump administration. That’s a battle likely to blow up in their faces. It is already bringing greater adverse scrutiny to those they say they want to protect.

Now the White House threatens to slap a Department of Justice subpoena on 23 jurisdictions — heavily Californian — if they refuse to voluntarily share details on their sanctuary policies.

That move was triggered by a spate of high-profile challenges to federal policy, including a lawsuit by San Francisco to block the administration’s attempt to withhold federal funds for jurisdictions out of compliance with federal law.

Some might say these struggles are just an illustration of federalism in action. But there’s more afoot, and more at stake. California Democrats say enforcing federal immigration law isn’t just unwise or even cruel but racist. And though that extreme claim seems at first to be extremely “pro-immigrant,” the reality is more complicated.

The truth is that the federal government can and will eventually force compliance with federal law, or extract penalties for failing to do so. And the burden of enforcement will fall squarely on immigrants and their children whose status within the legal gray area will be harshly determined.

Gov. Jerry Brown has done his best to guide state Democrats away from that kind of morally hazardous moralism. Brown signed California’s 2013 TRUST Act, which reasonably prevented law enforcement from keeping detained people on veritable standby, without a conviction, for pickup by federal immigration officials. But despite reservations about the wisdom of the Legislature’s “Sanctuary State” law, SB54, Brown gave in, taking the rare measure of appending a statement to his signature. “This bill,” he said, “does not prevent or prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security from doing their own work in any way.”

But that hope was at odds with the stated purpose of the legislation. According to the author of SB54, Senate Leader Kevin de León, its goal was to block an inhumane deportation machine. California officials decided to make it as difficult as possible for Trump to succeed.

Federal law is firmly on the side of Washington, D.C. and California Democrats’ provocative actions have only worsened the plight of the undocumented immigrants most Californians wish to bring out of the shadows.

The editorial board and opinion section staff are independent of the news-gathering side of our organization. Through our staff-written editorials, we take positions on important issues affecting our readership, from pension reform to protecting our region’s unique natural resources to transportation. The editorials are unsigned because, while written by one or more members of our staff, they represent the point of view of our news organization’s management. In order to take informed positions, we meet frequently with government, community and business leaders on important issues affecting our cities, region and state. During elections, we meet with candidates for office and the proponents and opponents of ballot initiatives and then make recommendations to voters.